Server for 4k and video editing

[Mad_Scientist]

Hey guys. Im looking to put together a system for 6 4k cameras. Have a couple questions and i'll try to be brief.

1. With the correct settings (ie direct recording,) will blue iris at 4k run well on older hardware? (Read '4 or 5 year old 4+ core server chips')
2. Can I install BI directly onto windows server 2016, or does it need to be in a VM? The server will also be domain controller and 20TB File server.
3. I'm looking to over power this for a couple reasons . First is that my other half needs a transcoding machine for making youtube videos. Second is that far off in the future she'll have a dedicated machine and .ill have headroom for more cameras. Advice on horsepower requirements per camera would be great to help get an idea of what kind of chips I should buy.
4. What kind of chips are currently recommended for super low power draw when the cameras are just idle. (Curious... anyone used arm since windows will run in it now?)
5. Last one... how many GB of ssd raid 0 cache would you recommend for 6 4k cameras? (Assuming 3 or 4 need to burst record at once)

Thanks for all the advice upfront!

JC

 

[mat200]

Hey guys. Im looking to put together a system for 6 4k cameras. Have a couple questions and i'll try to be brief.

1. With the correct settings (ie direct recording,) will blue iris at 4k run well on older hardware? (Read '4 or 5 year old 4+ core server chips')
2. Can I install BI directly onto windows server 2016, or does it need to be in a VM? The server will also be domain controller and 20TB File server.
3. I'm looking to over power this for a couple reasons . First is that my other half needs a transcoding machine for making youtube videos. Second is that far off in the future she'll have a dedicated machine and .ill have headroom for more cameras. Advice on horsepower requirements per camera would be great to help get an idea of what kind of chips I should buy.
4. What kind of chips are currently recommended for super low power draw when the cameras are just idle. (Curious... anyone used arm since windows will run in it now?)
5. Last one... how many GB of ssd raid 0 cache would you recommend for 6 4k cameras? (Assuming 3 or 4 need to burst record at once)

Thanks for all the advice upfront!

JC

Welcome @Mad_Scientist

Do take a look at the wiki section - there is good Blue Iris info there to get you started with answers to those questions.

 

[Mad_Scientist]

I read it. Also reviewed the update helper spreadsheet. I haven't really found anyone doing what I'm trying to do with building a multi purpose server, but it did shed some light on the hardware. The spreadsheet however didn't show the camera resolutions.

 

[bp2008]

You don't want to transcode for youtube on the same machine that runs Blue Iris. The transcode will use all your CPU and Blue Iris will have to fight for it. Blue Iris isn't going to behave well when starved of CPU time.

BI should run on server 2016. No VM required. In fact you don't want to run it in a VM because that makes it all but impossible to use Quick Sync video that is built in to most Intel consumer CPUs.

I suggest buying a refurbished i7-6700 or i7-7700 for BI for 6 4K cameras with room to expand. 8th gen CPUs are fine too but you won't find many refurbished, and I wouldn't buy one new today because 9th gen is just around the corner and rumored to bring another increase in CPU cores.

You do not need SSDs at all for Blue Iris. Any plain old hard drive will be fast enough. That said, if you have an SSD in the system, make Blue Iris put its clip database on there for a small performance gain. All video should be recorded to a mechanical hard drive because they are still far better price per GB than SSD storage.

 

[Mad_Scientist]

You don't want to transcode for youtube on the same machine that runs Blue Iris. The transcode will use all your CPU and Blue Iris will have to fight for it. Blue Iris isn't going to behave well when starved of CPU time.

I was thinking I would either A) try setting BI with a higher priority level so it gets served first. Or B) running the transcode software in a vm and giving it all but 2 or 3 of the cores

How much data is transferred from a single 4k stream? For some reason I was thinking 6 cameras going active at once would cause dropped frames due to hdd bottlenecks.

 

[bp2008]

You choose the bit rate of the stream, but there are limits which vary by camera. Typically you'll be in the ballpark of 4-8 Mbps (a.k.a. 0.5 to 1 MB/s) per stream. There's a table embedded at the bottom of this page which shows some recommended bit rates for H.264 at various resolutions and frame rates. Calculating Required Hard Drive Size | IP Cam Talk

 

[bp2008]

I was thinking I would either A) try setting BI with a higher priority level so it gets served first. Or B) running the transcode software in a vm and giving it all but 2 or 3 of the cores

That might work, and you can also set CPU affinity so a process only uses specific cores. Normally this only lasts until the process is restarted, but there's a tool called System Explorer which can set CPU affinity automatically when it sees a process get started. This is an indirect way of limiting an application's CPU usage.

 

[Mad_Scientist]

You choose the bit rate of the stream, but there are limits which vary by camera. Typically you'll be in the ballpark of 4-8 Mbps (a.k.a. 0.5 to 1 MB/s) per stream. There's a table embedded at the bottom of this page which shows some recommended bit rates for H.264 at various resolutions and frame rates. Calculating Required Hard Drive Size | IP Cam Talk

That's much less than I thought it would be actually. Thanks for the link.